Freedreno Enables Hardware Binning For Adreno A6xx GPUs - Yields Better Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 3 October 2018 at 06:36 AM EDT. Add A Comment
MESA
The open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno A6xx series hardware has taken another step forward with the latest Mesa 18.3-devel Git.

The reverse-engineered Freedreno Gallium3D driver has enabled support for hardware binning on the A6xx series hardware, the latest generation of GPUs found in Qualcomm SoCs. It was just back in August that the initial A6xx support landed inside this Gallium3D driver.

Similar to hardware binning on older Adreno hardware, for many OpenGL workloads this feature should yield better performance. Hardware binning is fundamentally about filtering out non-visible vertices for tiles.

Curious about the performance benefit for A6xx, Rob Clark commented to Phoronix that he hasn't done extensive testing yet but the expectation is the performance boost to be similar to previous hardware generations. Workloads without heavy geometry will likely see no performance difference while games like Xonotic and SuperTuxKart may see 20~30% uplift.

The code is in Mesa Git for the 18.3 release that will debut by the end of the year.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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